Category: 4. Society-at-large
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Should Children Learn to Code?
According to the WordPress summary of my site, the most popular post in 2014 was “Should You Learn to Code?”, beating out the perennial favorite “The Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model”. Obviously, the broader the interest, the more readers. This morning I read about the call by a German politician to introduce mandatory programming…
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Sexist Ads Alive and Well in 2015
I just saw an advertisement for software from an anti-virus company, homepage pictured below. The ad showed the woman flirting with the man (licking her lips, sliding her finger along the rim of the glass) while an overlaid text box was saying: “You don’t have to understand it, you just have to install it.” The…
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Should You Learn to Code?
The U.S. president Barack Obama wants to learn programming and so does former New York City major Michael Bloomberg. Germany’s chancelor Angela Merkel does not, but reports tell us that her cell phone connection was spied on by the U.S.A. As long as it doesn’t turn out to specifically have been Barrack Obama’s code which…
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Assumption About Longevity and Its Consequences
If you have run into me recently, I may have bugged you with the following question: Given the rapid pace of development in medical technology, I expect my generation to live to 100 years of age. A child being born today may live to the age of 250 years of age. Under this assumption, what…
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World Views Are Not Data Inconsistencies
I’m at Wikimania 2013, listening in on the WikiData session. WikiData is the Wikimedia Foundation’s attempt to go beyond prose in Wikipedia pages and provide a reference data source. An obvious problem is that any such data source needs an underlying model of the world, and that sometimes it is not only hard to gain…
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WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 Proceedings Published!
The WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 proceedings have been made available online. Please see below for the table of contents, including through-clickable papers. All papers listed can be cited as appearing in the Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym + OpenSym 2013). ACM, 2013.